Yesterday my employer Affecto organized a breakfast seminar about Alfresco cloud-offering and Alfresco ECM. We had David Gildeh from Alfresco as the main speaker presenting the cloud strategy and opportunities, as well as a case management demo implemented with basic features and components available in the Alfresco’s hybrid cloud architecture.

Alfresco’s approach to cloud services and solutions is extremely interesting as it leverages the flexibility and possibilities of in-premise ECM with the scale and easy adoption of software as a service solutions.

David provided some examples of early adopters who have already successfully implemented this architecture in their systems on global scale, extending large in-house systems from one location to reach users on global scale through the cloud.

Hybrid architecture opens up new possibilities to architect solutions and produce value fast. Alfresco’s cloud services cut – at least for some parts – the need for custom extranet solutions, if use cases and functionalities can be modeled and solved via features available in the cloud collaboration space.

The in premise system takes the role of orchestrating the business logic and connection to all the in-house systems – while cloud offers document based collaboration interface to business processes. Through available web or mobile interfaces – or via integration to other SaaS services, users have secure access to documents related to their work processes when they need them, where they need them.

We are currently working on few ideas, where these approaches could be taken into use in customer projects and how we could align project roadmaps to take better use of these possibilities in near future.

If you have opportunity to meet and chat with David about Alfresco’s hybrid cloud, I suggest you use it and allow him to transform your thinking. Alfresco’s cloud offering might just be the solution you did not know you were looking for.